Climate change burdens food production

ELON, N.C. – Two years ago, a couple approached journalist Elizabeth Kolbert at Washington University in St. Louis and asked why people should care about global warming. Kolbert simply responded, “Do you like to eat?”

Thursday night, she posed the same question to an audience at Elon University’s McCrary Theater.

According to Kolbert, a two-time author and staff writer for The New Yorker, agriculture and climate change are closely intertwined, and if the world wants to have an adequate supply of food in the future, it needs to take steps now to get global warming under control.

“Climate change is often presented as a problem about the melting ice and sea level rise,” Kolbert said. “But you could really argue that food production is going to be the biggest problem (and) it’s going to affect people most immediately where food is already tight.”

Carbon dioxide traps the sun’s energy and heat in the atmosphere, she said, and because the earth is always radiating its energy, the combination of the two will eventually warm the planet.

Already, she said, growing conditions in fertile areas of California, Africa, Australia and the Mediterranean have worsened because of greenhouse gases, while conditions for farming have improved in Greenland, Siberia and northern Canada – places that were, up until recently, impossible to farm.

According to Kolbert, droughts will be drier, rainy seasons will be wetter and global food production will be thrown off balance. And that’s why food prices spiked to near record levels in 2008 and 2010.

“This is what you’d expect in a warming world,” she said. “And food prices right now are quite high globally – a the product of lots of extreme weather his year.”

Kolbert said if the world wants to continue to have food to eat it can no longer remain passive in its efforts to reverse climate change.

According to her, Americans, are the primary contributors of carbon dioxide emissions, and she said that people can no longer be docile in the matter. Kolbert urges them to demand lawmakers enact change, especially if they want to continue to have enough to eat.

“People need to be involved politically,” Kolbert said. “I think that all the things we do on an individual level…don’t amount to anything unless we take concerted national efforts.”